Brandon Boyer

Seaman dev going iPhone with Gabo

Yutaka 'Yoot' Saito hasn't quite yet become a household name, but if you were gaming throughout the Dreamcast era you've probably at least heard of his work: he's the creator of the wonderfully grotesque Leonard Nemoy-voiced pet simulator Seaman, as well as the designer behind Maxis's SimTower (which later was released to GBA and DS as The Tower) and GameCube feudal Japan pinball/strategy game (!) Odama.

While we in the West haven't been treated to Saito's work since Odama, he has continued to rework his Seaman idea since, with a mobile phone version and a proper Seaman 2 sequel for PlayStation 2. Unlike the fishtank first, that sequel featured a Peking man with a disturbingly pert umbilical cord called Gabo, whom you communicated with as he went about his daily life (with a now more-evolved Seaman working as your companion).

Though it's fairly clear we'll never see a proper English version of Seaman 2, Saito has now revealed that he's bringing Gabo to iPhones as a low-priced app that lets you more directly poke at, pester, feed, and clean him, with what looks to feature about as much functionality as your average Tamagotchi.

His company DigiToys has uploaded a quick demonstration video of what to expect, and, after watching him mutter quietly to himself while tweaking and twisting his cord and then screaming impotently into the watery void, I have to admit I'm already forming a fast bond.

Gabo! ver1.0 [DigiToys, YouTube trailer]

Brandon Boyer

More like LittleBigDeathOfInnocence, innit

I'm stuck square in between horrified and delighted to see via Alice Taylor's Wonderland blog that Sony has partnered with the UK edition of Vice -- your monthly celebration of all things debauched -- for an all-LittleBigPlanet blowout, including "Sackboy fashion shoots, fake Sackboy ads for perfume and clothing," and, most disturbingly, the usual back-cover American Apparel ad with the little Sack lying alluringly in his/her banana-colored panties.

That said, anyone willing to send a copy overseas to Offworld HQ will be our new favorite person -- I think we yanks are stuck with the (actually quite good) No Photos issue.

Brandon Boyer

Fallout 3: Everybody Dance! edition

While the unofficial modders have been busy doing dire and otherwise pedestrian things with their Fallout 3 installs like hacking in child killing and more realistic gun noises (or so I've just learned from the 'related videos'), 'airshom' reminds us of why we like to let people tinker around inside their games. Be forewarned that if you haven't seen everything there is to see around the Wasteland, you might end up seeing some things you're not ready to see.

Bethesda: this is the kind of DLC we'd also pay for. We know you didn't put those party hats in there without a good reason.

Brandon Boyer

An Offworld Thanksgiving: L-tryptophan edition

Xeni and I had been batting ideas back and forth earlier this week about what might go into a Thanksgiving-themed Offworld BBtv episode, and while we decided against it in the end, it still had me brainstorming about recent releases perfect for postprandial tryptophan-induced sedate-gaming. Here's a quick list of three off the top of my head, add your own in the comments below if there's something I've missed...

Fallout 3

As I recently discovered -- quite unintentionally -- Bethesda's RPG makes for perfect extreme-hangover gaming, a mindstate not too far away from a belly-full coma. Though it might sound like a slight, I take it as an asset: one of Fallout's draws is that a number of its sidequests and its exploration in general aren't the most mentally taxing. In fact, one of the things I think the game does best is let you stumble almost continually on a series of small messes that exist only for you to tidy. It became almost a mantra during that hangover head sick session: "I found a building. It was a mess. I cleaned it up. I felt satisfied. I moved on."

Animal Crossing: City Folk

Though I've never heard any of its directors or designers explicitly state it, I've got a strong hunch one of Animal Crossing's guiding principles was that of the Slow Life movement that spread across Japan in the early 'oughts, seeking to "shift from a society of mass production and mass consumption, to a society that is not hectic and does cherish our possessions and things of the heart."

It's not just the provincial setting or the townsfolk whose lives are little more than neighborly gossip (see also: basically any post-war Yasujiro Ozu movie for the real world cultural touchstones there). It's straight down to the game's interactions themselves: try and get basically any task accomplished in less than a minute and you'll be strained. The series forces you at every turn to sloooow down and settle into its signature torpor.

Soul Bubbles

Developer Mekensleep was taken to task by a number of enthusiast reviewers for a perceived lack of difficulty in its DS debut, but its underlying old-world and naturalistic environments basically demand more leisurely exploration. That's not to say that the game doesn't have its own difficulties, or that complete runs of its levels are anything approaching a cakewalk. Soul Bubbles keeps its difficulty in places for you to seek it out if you want it, but leaves you free to enjoy yourself without it, making it one of the more suitably relaxing (and unfortunately underappreciated) games for the handheld.

As for me, I'll be spending the rest of today wending my way slowly through a backlog of things I haven't yet had a chance to get to and would like to talk about in the coming weeks: Rare's Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, BioShock's PS3 exclusive downloadable Challenge Rooms, and the European release of Grasshopper Manufacture's DS adventure remake Flower, Sun and Rain.

Brandon Boyer

Sony's own inspired holiday sales

Like Microsoft, Sony has announced its own Black Friday digital download deals that seem pointed straight at the one true Offworld heart. PixelJunk Eden for starters, is a quintessential Offworld game. Developer Q-Games (a different Q, mind, than Rez's), after creating the more traditional DS shooter Starfox Command for Nintendo, has gone gloriously off the deep end and focused on partnering with musicians and visual artists outside the industry to create entirely new experiences. In Eden's case, that artist was Baiyon, whose organic vectors and thumping trance would form its inimitable playground, resulting in one of the most essential downloads on the PlayStation Network.

Not entirely far away is Sony's own internally produced The Last Guy. Directed by the same Denki Groove-related team that put together Baito Hell 2000, the PSP high-weirdness mini-game collection (known in the West and also available for download on PSN as Work Time Fine [W.T.F.]), the easiest way to describe The Last Guy is as Pac-Man via Nokia's Snake game all played out over Google Maps.

It might always be best known for its equally baffling promotional campaign -- which depicted the developers as a backwoods Indian team known as Hindustan Electronics -- and its unmistakably Popcorn-esque theme song, but the game itself is another true inspired Offworld cult classic.

Brandon Boyer

The face of the Wii Theremin

Ken Moore's patched together custom theremin, made from a Wii-mote and a Roland JV-1080 synth, is one of my favorite hardware mods making the rounds, but the experience is -- as Ken's wife is apparently quick to add -- one better listened to than watched.

See also: Ken playing the Star Trek theme via the system.

Brandon Boyer

A holiday deal on Sound and Vision

Here are two reasons I like Microsoft's Black Friday Xbox Live Arcade specials: one is that they've lowered the price on Q Entertainment's HD remake of Dreamcast/PS2 rhythm/shooter Rez, which means there is essentially no excuse not to experience the game if you haven't before. Inspired by, the story goes, one of his first rave experiences (this would have been the very late 90's, mind), Sega designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi set out to create a game that could blend that light and sound and palpable pulsing rhythm as fantastically. The result was Rez, and a long series of music/puzzle games since.

The second is that it gives me an excuse to post this recent YouTube Live Genki Rockets video Q CEO Shuji Utsumi pointed to earlier today. As mentioned in the last Q-related post, Genki Rockets is Q's music property fronted by teen pop star Lumi, the first baby born in outer space who beams her j-pop disco to Earth from 30 years in the future.

Even if the style of music isn't your cup of euro-beats, there's kind of nothing not amazing about the performance, from the faceless DJ-naut on the ones and twos, to Lumi's eventual appearance on the monolithic low-res LED screen, fingers sending off glittering trails as she does her interstellar dance: all precisely the kind of synaesthetic experience that inspired Mizuguchi to create Rez in the first place.

The rest of Microsoft's sales are at Major Nelson's website.

Margaret Robertson

One More Go: New York Times Crosswords

"7 DOWN (5 letters): Donkey Kong company"

The swells of the end-of-year gaming surge are still carrying me out to sea, the living room floor strewn with the wreckage of Fable 2, Resistance 2, Little Big, Mirror’s Edge, Gears Of War 2, Left 4 Dead and an unopened copy of Moto GP ‘08 I found in amongst the cookery books. The tide is showing no signs of turning, sweeping me out further and further, later and later each night. But somehow, every evening, I struggle back to shore, to my safe, sheltered, gaming harbour: BudCat’s New York Times Crosswords. Despite Valve’s millions, EA’s blanket media blitz and Sony’s increasingly unlikable promo Sackboy variants, every evening ends with me grabbing my DS and firing up an 18-month old game which opens with a inept cartoon of a vomiting cat.

But why? What could a game with no score, no story, no spectacle, and no real character beyond the vomiting cat (BudCat may well have reworked their ident since their recent acquisition by Activision) have to lure me away from the riches of this Autumn’s release list? The simple answer: clues like the one above. And yep, that’s a real clue from a real New York Times Crossword. Reading it, all you know for certain is there are only two people in this deal - you and the guy who wrote the clue - and one of you is being really, really dumb. Donkey Kong company. Five letters. Could it be a trick? Some clever crossword subtlety you’re missing?

Or has the esteemed New York Times got its Japanese heavyweights confused - all the more understandable when you allow these puzzles were compiled a good few years before the Wii comeback coup - and wants you to commit the sacrilege of inscribing ‘NAMCO’ into the spaces? And that takes you into a very satisfying game of second-guessing. Would the not-very-videogame-savvy crossword designer be more likely to have heard of Namco or Taito? Could they have asked the advice of their Sony-loving 12-year-old and been told, disparagingly ‘Ninty’?

Then: curve ball. Solving another clue gives you a terminal ‘I’. I? Weird. Unless...unless. No, can’t be. Couldn’t be. They’re not even Japanese! But yes, what fits is Atari. And suddenly, with a single, trivial oversight, the New York Times rewrites gaming history. Suddenly, instead of Pong, Nolan Bushnell unleashes a stark, monochrome rescue challenge on the world. AVOID MISSING PRINCESS FOR HIGH SCORE burns itself into the brains of a generation. A couple of sequels expand the world of this strange new hero and, keen to bring its popularity to bear on the 2600, Atari execs strong-arm Warren Robinett into populating Adventure with mushroom monsters and making the green dragon friendly.

The new franchise becomes so popular, that - at the last minute - the decision is taken to stop development on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and instead divert full resources to Mario’s Revenge, a hypnotic shooter in which the plucky plumber must shoot fireballs through a dazzling, kaleidoscopic barrier while dodging Donkey Kong’s laser-barrels.

Mario’s Revenge is such a huge hit it leads to the Great Videogame Surge of 1983. With its vast resources of cash, Atari bring forward development of its revolutionary Lynx handheld, which - thanks to the popularity of Mushroom Kingdom Games, which features goomba-skimming, piranha-plant-vaulting and dinosaur racing - outsells the Game Boy ten-to-one. Nintendo, resources depleted after losing successive court battles, drops out of the videogame industry. Atari, looking to consolidate its home entertainment empire, diverts a fraction of its massive wealth to buy television manufacturers Sony, resuscitating the failing Betamax format in the process.

And on and on we go. From one slip of a crossword compiler’s pen, I get thirty years worth of games I’ve never played, machines I’ve never touched, and crossovers I’d never imagined (who can forget when Bronson Pinchot lost out to Charles Martinet for the part of Larry Appleton’s countrified Mushroom Kingdom cousin in Perfect Strangers?). How could the combined might of Sony, EA, Microsoft and Valve ever match that? Although, if they could give me a hand with 46 DOWN (6 letters): In cubbyholes (S blank R blank) I promise I’ll get back to Albion, asap.

[Margaret Robertson is the former editor of Edge magazine and now videogame consultant. One More Go is her regular Offworld column in which she explores the attractions of the games she just can't stop going back to.]

Brandon Boyer

Paddle your way through an 8-bit raid

Why we love other peoples' idle hands: they do brilliantly devlish things like take one-off April Fools gags by World of Warcraft makers Blizzard and bring them gloriously to life. But man! Is it as hard as you've heard.

The Molten Core [via Rock Paper Shotgun]

Brandon Boyer

1up-Zine takes us to our Funspot

Upon further investigation this happens to be a bit old, but I'm going to fork it over anyway, for a number of reasons: a.) it was just indirectly pointed out to me by my old co-worker Simon Carless, b.) it gives me an opportunity to mention the always excellent work Raina Lee has done, and 3.) I'm hoping it'll prompt her to properly finish.

Lee is the recent author of Chronicle Books' Hit Me With Your Best Shot: The Ultimate Guide To Karaoke Domination, but prior to her empty-orchestra empire she earned her street cred with the 1up-zine, spanning three lovingly hand-crafted screenprint and xerox issues that brought an entirely different perspective to the usual print-media affairs. The writing was always personal, usually unapologetically nostalgic, and Raina gathered top class talent to do comics and art interspersed between the articles.

You can see a preview version (pdf) of her still-unfinished fourth issue, with some road-diaries of a cross-country trip to classics arcade Funspot, and a history of the joint itself from Twin Galaxies' Walter Day, who you'll all instantly recognize from his role in the fantastic King of Kong documentary.

Funspot special 1up-zine PDF [via GameSetWatch]

Joel Johnson

Blip Festival '08 daytime activities sound like a blast

We don't usually copy-and-paste press releases, but I hope you'll forgive me this once; the information about all the DIY classes and demos that will be going on during the chiptunes mega-adventure-event BLIP FESTIVAL 2008 is too good not to share. Check out these daytime activities:

: • Make Your Own Visualist – electronics building workshop

• Surrealtime 2: 8-bit Demo Show

• 2A03 Workshop - Crash Course in FamiTracker with Baron Knoxburry

• Beyond Vegavox: NES albums and music on real hardware

• Screening: "Blip Festival:Reformat the Planet"

Blip Festival 2008 information [BlipFestival.org]

[Image: Minusbaby]

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

We can fix that with data

Terminally obsessed with player statistics -- and with good reason, it being one of the top contributors to making their games as balanced and smart as they are -- Valve have published current total Achievement percentages for the first week of Left 4 Dead sessions.

What do they show? That Smokers really aren't all that bad, apparently, that it really is sort of every-Survivor-for-themselves, with only some 15 percent doing the majority of healing and pill giving (though we're happy to see that 25 percent that have healed others when they've been on the outs themselves), and that it's really quite hard to stay away from that Boomer vomit.

Left 4 Dead - Achievements [and thanks to the best-named-games-blog-on-the-internet for the entry title]

Brandon Boyer

Coop does Guitar Hero

Despite being a certifiable friend of Boing Boing (having designed, if you recall, the excellent Jackhammer Jill t-shirt earlier this year), we're just as surprised as everyone to learn that he's quietly snuck four de-luxe aluminum Guitar Hero faceplates into his online store, which is giving us all kinds of wicked ideas about further artist-edition plates.

Products | Guitar Hero Faceplates | Coopstuff

Joel Johnson

Because He Could: Atari 2600 in a Sega Game Gear shell

Here's something you've never seen before: a Sega Game Gear that can run for eight hours on just two AA batteries. Mind you it's because there's no Game Gear inside, but instead the innards of an Atari 2600 that outputs to a tiny 2.5-inch LCD screen.

It's the work of one Chris Koopa, a man driven mad by a lifetime of Nintendo jibes from his peers who has vowed to create a portable game golem from the bodies of fallen foes that will finally best the DS.

Sega Game Gear Atari 2600 Portable [Technabob via Ben Heck forums]

Brandon Boyer

Offworld/BBtv: Status Report edition

While we here at Offworld gather exclusive content for future editions of Offworld's BBtv transmissions, our second update is a status report, telling the wider world what we've been getting up to over the past week (including the rapid growth of our Boing Boing Steam group, as we all gather for Left 4 Dead extended plays), and a quick rundown of the new things coming to the site in the following weeks.

As usual, here's the direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable rather than the Flash.

Brandon Boyer

Behind the frontlines of the virtual economy mavens

Journalist Julian Dibbell, apart from being the author of the excellent My Tiny Life (which you may have noted is a permanent fixture on my bookshelf), is someone who has intimate knowledge of the virtual worlds real-money-trading underbelly, having spent a year doing it full time for his more recent book, Play Money.

So I'm happy to note that his latest feature for Wired has just arrived online, which chronicles the rise, and rise, and sudden fall of virtual economy entrepreneur Brock Pierce. Pierce was one of the co-founders of IGE, a company that rose from the murky grey market of trading virtual items and currency for real world money, to going properly legit with a massive investment from Goldman Sachs.

As Dibbell explains:

I was around when RMT as a profession was almost exclusively the province of small-timers like me and the very notion of a multinational, 500-employee virtual-items business doing over a quarter billion dollars in trades was practically unimaginable. And I was around three years later when rumors of a $60 million Goldman Sachs investment in IGE first broke and for a moment it seemed possible that Pierce had a handle on something deeper and more enduring than just a profitable business: the future maybe, not only of virtual retailing but of economic life in general.

And I am here today, admiring the views at Pierce's LA home, because I figure it's my best shot at an answer to the only question I can think of asking in the face of a story like IGE's: How did it happen?

The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire

Brandon Boyer

Explain Leeroy to the fish: Offworld on Air America

There's a certain primary education process that I think a lot of us take for granted about games, and assume in other people. Case in point: yesterday, I was invited to be a guest on Air America Radio to explain precisely what it meant that Obama's new FCC transition team co-chair was a level 70 Tauren shaman.

I'd made a lot of assumptions, actually, including believing the call to be a pre-recording that would get slickly edited down to a few seconds of soundbytes (which I had all pithily prepared) to go into a longer NPR-style news clip, assumptions which were summarily shattered 10 minutes before my phone was supposed to ring when a friend wrote on the wall of my Facebooks, "So here I am, listening to Air America... 'coming up later, Brandon Boyer,'" and I realized I was about to be on live for quite a long time, facing questions I might necessarily not be up to answer.

That was somewhat relieved when host Ron Kuby led in the piece as I was on hold by rattling off facetiously sweeping generalizations of who World of Warcraft players were, and then brought me on to do some very, very basic explaining. Turns out: that's a lot more difficult when you've been immersed eyeball deep in the culture for as many years as I have and have to take it all back to square one. As in: have you ever tried to explain what exactly 'Leeroy Jenkins' is or why it's funny? I'd never had to, until I was live on national radio.

You can hear me valiantly try, though, via Kuby's archives at Air America (though from what I gather the clip ends rather abruptly after an offhand 'teamsters' analogy). Coincidentally, and it would take me another few hours for this to click, Kuby is indeed one-and-the-same the Ron Kuby you hear 'The Dude' Lebowski ask for after the Malibu chief of police beans him with a coffee mug (!). Oh, right, and, you know, also a civil rights activist and lawyer of fantastic renown.

Brandon Boyer

Your game face

Currently making the rounds due to a downright impolite remix I'll leave it to you to find yourself (but suffice it to say is not one you'll want to have your work speakers turned up for), is the New York Times' video from Robbie Cooper's 'Immersion' project, which is photographing the reactions of children entranced by games (from the sound of it, Call of Duty 4). From an interview with Cooper in UK's Telegraph:

The plan is to settle on a group of 75 game-playing children - selected by a researcher to represent a cross-section of ethnic groups, income brackets and cultural backgrounds within Britain - and spend 18 months using the technique to film them reacting to different manifestations of screen warfare, be they videogames, news footage, internet videos or feature films. Cooper will then log their expressions and work with a psychologist and sociologist to interpret the results in light of the psychological profiles of the individual children.

The New York Times - Video Library - Immersion

Brandon Boyer

Guitar Center survey shows guitar game players buying real guitars

Guitar Hero and Rock Band creators Harmonix were founded on the hopes that they could inspire a league of new musicians through software, so presumably they'll be happy to hear the results of a new Guitar Center survey which showed the following:

· Of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band players that do not currently play a musical instrument, two-thirds (67%) indicated that they are likely to begin playing a real instrument in the next two years.

· Nearly three out of four (72%) musicians who play games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band have spent more time playing their real instrument(s) since they began playing these games.

· Eight out of 10 (81%) of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band players that have been inspired to play an instrument because of the games would like to receive a musical instrument as a gift this winter holiday season.

· Sales of gear for first-timers at Guitar Center has surged along with the peak in sales for Guitar Hero and Rock Band. In the holiday selling season in the last quarter of 2007, Guitar Center saw a +20.7% jump in comparable store sales for beginner-level electric guitar & amplifiers. This surge grew even stronger through the first nine months of 2008, when Guitar Center's cumulative comparable store sales for the category increased +26.9%.

arealguitar [Guitar Center]

Brandon Boyer

The Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Champion Hyper Plus Remixes

Our favorite part of Capcom's HD enhanced and remade Super Street Fighter II Turbo Remix release about to go live on the PlayStation Network today? In keeping with its recent track record of solid bonus material for its retro revivals (speaking here mainly of Mega Man 9's faux-NES cart CD case), Capcom's put together a very well curated mix of hip-hop/DJ artists doing Street Fighter based songs, which it will be releasing for free alongside the game.

Particularly, the appearance of DJ Qbert (whom you can preview via the project's MySpace page) doing the scratch-happy comic book cut-up narratives that are his trademark does us proud.

Brandon Boyer

LittleBigWatch: Play with Kandinsky

I've been following KirbyKid's delightfully obscure blog for some time, where he's been showing an almost troubling level of dedication to deconstructing the gameplay of everything from Super Mario Bros. to Treasure's excellent roll-your-own DS shooter Bangai-O Spirits (check his critical-glossary for an extrapolated glimpse into the madness).

It was with some interest, then, that I noted his most recent entry, in which he explains how he put LittleBigPlanet's level editor through its paces by attempting to bring a Kandinsky painting to life, garnished with a layer of generative and improvisational music:

# I looked to paintings like the one above for inspiration. I also looked at Kandinsky's paintings from his "Improvisation" series.

# Another idea from the list is for a level that uses musical sounds to create a harmonizing melody. As the player moves closer to the end of the level and as the player platforms more boldly, the generated music would sound more cohesive while matching with the player's platforming tempo and prowess.

# I decided to combine these two ideas harmonizing around the concept of improvisation. The abstract, non structured, freedom of the Kandinsky paintings (form) will influence a similar freewheeling, intersecting style of platforming. And the musical, positional sound design will blend with these two ideas to create a circular, playful flow throughout the level that moves the player in any and all directions.

Having taken the level for a spin, I can comfortably say that Jimi Hendrix's song structures make for a happier Guitar Hero level than Kandinsky's art makes for a platformer -- its shapes too chaotic to make for pleasing play -- but I sincerely applaud the attempt to break LittleBigPlanet from its traditional bonds and do something entirely unique, and will be eagerly watching further efforts.

Critical-Gaming Network - Blog - Improvisation #1 [Critical-Gaming Network]

Brandon Boyer

Ben Marra's view from Vice City

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal comments on (recent i am 8-bit contributor) Ben Marra's GTA:Vice City inspired sketch, "Illustrations like this make us wish for the videogame equivalent of The Criterion Collection," which just about sums it up perfectly.

Benjamin Marra [via EGO...trip]

Brandon Boyer

Rolito unleashes new Patapon toy

With the release of Sony's second installment of rhythm/strategy game Patapon due in Japan in just days, Rolito -- the French designer who lent his "delicious vectorial poison" to the game -- has shown off his latest related toy, a new pop-art patterned Bearbrick from Medicom.

While it lacks the contrast and visual punch of his first Bearbrick, this one has the added benefit of actually being released to the public (the first being doled out by Sony and others as promotional items), albeit as part of a blindbox series. December will also see the release of a cell strap set of individual Patapon 'ultra detail' figures (I'm partial to the lackluster second and the grimacing fourth).

Patapon x Medicom (3) [Rolito]

Brandon Boyer

The irony being no-one even reads them anymore

Excellent eBay cool-hunting blog gamesniped recently linked to an auction for an original PDP-11 manual for seminal text adventure Zork, autographed by creators Mark Blank, Dave Lebling and Joel Berez, along with an original business card from developer Infocom.

Its final price? $2,348.31. The funniest part? Gamesniped's ultra dry warning before their link: "Now, before you see the price on this auction, you should know that there is a very active collecting scene dedicated to Infocom games." [via Waxy]

Brandon Boyer

The Wasteland gets a little wider

The most devastating part of reaching the level 20 cap in Fallout 3 is losing that Paper Planes-like cash register ka-ching that punctuates each kill and discovery, but there's always been something alluring about the way your Pip-boy experience meter continues on to 21 that lets you know that you're not quite done just yet.

Which is true: Bethesda have announced the first round of downloadable content for the 360 and PC games, which will be spread throughout the first three months of next year, starting with "Operation: Anchorage" in January, which will let you "enter a military simulation and fight in one of the greatest battles of the Fallout universe – the liberation of Anchorage, Alaska from its Chinese Communist invaders."

Next will come "The Pitt," a "journey to the industrial raider town called The Pitt, located in the remains of Pittsburgh," and finally, the first round of content that will extend the main quest, "Broken Steel," in March, in which you'll "join the ranks of the Brotherhood of Steel and rid the Capital Wasteland of the Enclave remnants once and for all."

December will also see the release of the G.E.C.K., the "official editor for Fallout 3," which will open up the game to the modding community, which I believe means I'm going to have to start the game anew there to reap the rewards, and I'm honestly not sure I mind.

Fallout 3 [Bethesda, photo courtesy Duncan Harris's postcard-pretty set of images]

Brandon Boyer

Flashbang opening the Minotaur China Shop

One of the most charming things about indie developers Flashbang is their no-nonsense approach to both game design and game titles. Both Off-Road Velociraptor Safari and Jetpack Brontosaurs deliver exactly what they say on the tin, and both extremely adeptly, using 3D browser plugin Unity for a near console-like experience (obligatory achievements and all) from the comfort of the web.

Following a brief diversion to the iPhone, Flashbang says its latest 3D browser game -- Minotaur China Shop -- is nearly ready for beta testing, and again looks from the above trailer to be -- brilliantly -- exactly what it sounds like.

All of Flashbang's works available on their portal Blurst are based on playful physicality -- Splume's physics-enhanced Puzzle Bobble-alike play, Velociraptor's vehicles, Jetpack's jetpack, and Minotaur's precariously placed racks of valuables.

Plus, huge bonus points to Flashbang for scoring Minotaur's trailer with blip-maker E*vax, one half of the excellent duo Ratatat and a perennial Offworld favorite.

Minotaur China Shop, Twitter Reminder [Blurst via IndieGames]

Brandon Boyer

Rock Band, EyeToy added to UK's National Videogame Archive

I've done a bad job at mentioning this thus far, but, prompted by the most recent news via GamesIndustry, I note that new submission videos have been uploaded for the UK's National Videogame Archive. First announced in September, the founders explain:

The National Videogame Archive is a joint project between the National Media Museum and Nottingham Trent University, which aims to celebrate that culture and preserve that history for researchers, developers, game fans and the public...

The Archive is working to preserve, analyse and display the products of the global videogame industry by placing games in their historical, social, political and cultural contexts. This means treating videogames as more than inert, digital code: at the heart of the National Videogames Archive is the determination to document the full life of games, from protoypes and early sketches, through box-art, advertising and media coverage, to mods, fanart and community activities.

At the Save the Videogame site, you can see celebrity submissions from a number of noteworthy developers, including Jon 'Lego Star Wars' Smith, Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet team, and Uncharted's Richard Lamarchand. As GamesIndustry points out, both Sony and Harmonix have announced new hardware submissions, with prototype versions of the EyeToy and Rock Band guitar.

Save the Videogame [National Videogame Archive]

Brandon Boyer

Space Invaders about to Get Even on WiiWare

It's been a harrowing past two weeks waking up to the Monday morning press-release deluge and realizing that, no, it's still not the week that the U.S. gets Space Invaders Get Even, after its European WiiWare debut. Square Enix was kind enough, though, to cut the tension and announce that December 1st will be, err.. SI-day.

Why the excitement? Long overdue (30 years!) for some payback, Get Even, as the name suggests, finally breaks from the past and this time justly plays from the vantage point of the fluorescent invaders themselves, wreaking havok on the world and the defense forces it's assembled, and serves as a fantastic light hearted and comic-book-colorful counterpoint to the slickly retro-futuristic DS/PSP/Xbox Live Arcade's Space Invaders Extreme.

Brandon Boyer

Mechner talks film, game, graphic novel storytelling

Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner has uploaded an opinion column recently published in Game Informer magazine, detailing how he's varied his approaches in creating games, movies, and graphic novels based on his same property.

As much a filmmaker as a gamemaker by trade (having filmed a documentary on the controversial buy-out and razing of Los Angeles Mexican American neighborhood Chavez Ravine, and wrote the screenplay for the upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer/Disney-produced Sands of Time film), Mechner has an innate sense and talks well on letting each medium do what it does best, rather than shoehorning content from one medium to another.

Take note, too, if you haven't already, of Mechner's "old journals," where he's reprinting hand-written diaries from the time when he was just getting his start in the industry, featuring guest appearances by a little known game coming out of Russia called Tetris, and early rotoscope reference video of the Prince's animations.

jordanmechner.com » Blog Archive » Game to movie to graphic novel

John Brownlee

de_vangogh: Counterstrike goes "The Starry Night"

There's the mere existence of a Counterstrike level based upon Vincent van Gogh's psychotically hallucinogenic masterpiece, "The Starry Night." Each surface and skybox is taken from the texture of oils the mutilated maniac slathered upon canvas, and that itself is something to be cherished, whether pompously or out of glee.

But then you wonder what van Gogh would have thought, glimpsing the future of his painting in a fever dream as he lay sweating in his asylum cell overlooking the Rhone. A bunny-hopped battle between masked pre-pubescent terrorists, firing uzis and shrieking smack talk at each other in the swirling sanitarium of his delirium. And that's what is awesome: a vision of "Starry Night" more insane than van Gogh himself could ever hope to be.

Download Starry Night CS Here [Nipper Maps via Fidgit]

Brandon Boyer

The gamer-in-chief

Tom Armitage has updated his site with his recent GameCity festival talk on what it means to have our first generation entering public life who've grown up playing games. Waxing on how that familiarity might inform their approach to resource scarcity, the complexity of an ever more -- and data-rich -- connected world, and 'an end to colocation', Armitage says:

So what does a future run by gamers look like? Well, if they can handle complexity, and they’ve stocked up all the magic item chests ready for when scarcity hits, and they’ve failed enough times at the low-stakes games that they know they can make it at the high-stakes ones, and if our environment is one carefully planned out for effective growth rather than rammed together for efficiency, and if they understand how to handle the ever-more complex forms of communications necessary to deal with the large, distributed teams of people necessary to understand complexity - and if they can create a world that supplies and consumes the data necessary to make smart, informed, decisions - then they might just make it awesome...

And even if we don’t get that, maybe a fraction of that will trickle through, that’s still a start. Games are wonderful things, and people who get games are wonderful people, but they don’t just have to make more games, you know. You could change the world.

The ideas here share a happy overlap with the Superstruct ARG being run by Jane McGonigal and the Institute for the Future. McGonigal has been tirelessly championing the idea of bringing more game-like interactions to all aspects of everyday life to make it more engaging and generally increase happiness.

Specifically, Superstruct itself is her attempt to do just that as it relates to future public policy debates: the game that attempts to "chronicle the world of 2019--and imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It’s about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential."

The talk is also, of course, prescient following news that Obama's FCC transition team co-chair is a dedicated World of Warcraft player.

If Gamers Ran The World [Infovore]

Rob Beschizza

Welcome to your Doom in a browser

Ported directly to Flash 10 thanks to Adobe's Alchemy, which allows coders to compile C and C++ into their Actionscript creations, Doom may now be shot up in the browser.

Author "Mike" from Newsgrounds offers few clues as to how he went about it, but it works well enough: it's like having a 133Mhz Pentium all over again!

Though it includes only the shareware portion of the game, it's high time Flash, given its ubiquity, started making progress on the pretty-pictures front—anyone familiar with the Unity browser plug-in knows that there's no technical reason browser games can't serve up high-performance visuals.

Doom in a browser [Newsgrounds via RPS]

Brandon Boyer

Hand Circus's Rolando rolling ever nearer

Currently just about everybody's most anticipated iPhone game, publisher ngmoco has released the latest trailer for developer Hand Circus's candy-colored tilt-and-touch platformer Rolando, highlighting a new pop-up book style world selection screen and a new December release date.

Ngmoco have boldly claimed that their company charter is to become the "first party" of iPhone games. Following on the release of their low-cost/high-quality Maze Finger and Topple, and with Dr. Awesome and Dropship on the way, there's serious potential behind that posture.

Brandon Boyer

Rodney Alan Greenblat organizing Zen temple fundraiser

Parappa, UmJammer Lammy and Major Minor artist Rodney Alan Greenblat -- now often going by his newly bestowed Buddhist name Musho -- is coordinating a December 13th holiday market for his New York City Zen temple, The Village Zendo, including a table of his own prints, postcards, posters, and "a few unreleased product items too, including some funky little ceramic flower vases made in Japan."

Greenblat's own web store has a preview of much of that artwork, as well as a slew of import only and original Parappa and UnJammer goods, and fantastic Buddhist statuary done in his inimitable style.

Hello Zen! holiday market 2008 [Village Zendo NYC]

Brandon Boyer

KodyKoala's Mushroom Kingdom customs

Sitting (quite uncomfortably) somewhere between Japan's Tom of Finland-esque muscle-bound Nintendo parody comics and dollar-store action figure knockoffs, the most disturbing part of 'KodyKoala's "custom Mario figures" might not be Toad's icy gaze or Peach's frozen grimace (which Kody calls 'just right'), but Mario's left hand just seconds away from clutching at her skirt.

KodyKoala's Custom Mario Figures [via theBBPS]

Brandon Boyer

A new look at DS space opera Infinite Line

Though there's a lot to be said for the cheeky sexuality of Bayonetta and the slapstick ultra-violence of Mad World, of all the games Japan based collective Platinum Games announced earlier this year, DS space epic Infinite Line had me at hello.

It wasn't just the promise of vast, free space exploration shrunk down to palm size, or the fact that you could decorate your warships with lipstick kisses (though both helped), it was designer's Hifumi Kouno's assertion that "in playing through the story, across vast space, the player will discover what it means to be human in this vast emptiness."

While we wait for more detail on quite how Kouno can affirm our essential humanity, thanks to Tiny Cartridge we have the first English version of Infinite Line's happily perplexing anime intro short.

Infinite Space DS short fansub (DATS) [YouTube, via Tiny Cartridge]

Joel Johnson

NoVVember: A month of Gradius' Vic Vipers in LEGO

A friendly challenge among LEGO builders on Flickr called "NoVVember" brings us these intersections of bricks and Gradius — the double-V stands for "Vic Viper".

Top Views of Vic Vipers [Flickr via Brothers Brick]

Brandon Boyer

NCsoft bringing Tabula Rasa to a close

Following earlier word that creator Richard Garriott was leaving the company to pursue presumably more directly space-related interests after an inspiring visit aboard the International Space Station, NCsoft has announced that his epic sci-fi MMO will soon be shuttered as well:

Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we've achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there. Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn't performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for.

So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009.

Message from the Tabula Rasa Team [NCsoft]

Joel Johnson

Passage's Jason Rohrer and emotional game experiences

Esquire profiles Jason Rohrer, creator of Passage. That little game, playable in just five minutes, provides one of the most emotionally affecting experiences of any game yet. Rohrer is apparently consulting at EA now to help developed "LMNO", another Spielberg-backed game project:

And if this new breed of emotional game can also rake in the cash, well, all the better. Under way right now is a high-stakes race to create the Citizen Kane of video games: an "AAA" title (the industry's equivalent of a big-budget summer movie) that also pushes the needle forward artistically. The best current contender is a project code-named LMNO, part of Stephen Spielberg's development deal with Electronic Arts, which has been described as North by Northwest meets E.T. Your character in the game will be a spy who encounters a mysterious, sexy woman. How much help she offers will be dependent upon how well you cultivate her as your partner and guide. Essentially, LMNO aims to be the first major video game whose action will not pivot on jumping puzzles or twitch-reflex fusillades but on a nuanced relationship.

Brandon adds: Little is still known about LMNO (apart from the above information and this small preview shot [higher def version coming when I can remember where I've squirreled it away]), but it promises to be one of EA's most interesting projects, having again brought together designers Randy Smith and Doug Church. Smith and Church are veterans of developer Looking Glass, a studio still talked about primarily in hushed reverent tones, and had their hands in some of PC gaming's finest, most notably Thief, System Shock, and Deus Ex. The fact that they've brought Rohrer on board as consultant gives it even further potential as a thought provoking title that'll light the art/intellectual-gamer set ablaze.

At Gamasutra, Persuasive Games' Ian Bogost has just written his own breakdown of Between, the game Rohrer created for Esquire to accompany the writeup, and has coined a new term -- 'disjunctive multiplayer' -- in the process.

The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls [Esquire.com via Waxy]

Brandon Boyer

Would You Like To Play A Game? Left 4 Dead Edition

Boing Boing Gadgets had originally opened up the floor to doing community gaming sessions well before Offworld had launched, but now that it has, I'd like to kick off an official regular weekend group-play feature. Seeing as how it's just dropped and is by all means terribly smart and perfect for actually gaming together, this week's Would You Like To Play A Game?.. err, game will be Valve's Left 4 Dead.

Here's how to play:

Steam: Join the Boing Boing Steam Group to play with us or other Boing Boing readers.

Xbox Live: While we work on getting Xbox Live Gamertags linked off of Boing Boing profile pages, you can leave your own via the comments below. Mine is brandonnn (as with Steam), and the 360 is likely where I'll actually be fighting back the zombie onslaught. BBG's Joel is Joelev, and BBG's Rob and John still may not have fully joined the console era yet. In the meantime, you can check that earlier post for other community IDs.

Just please remember, what we're trying to do is not startle the Witch.

Brandon Boyer

The Offworld Launch Week Unicorn Chaser

We're wrapping up the first week here at Offworld, and I should thank everyone that's commented, written, and left overwhelmingly positive notes about the launch here, and say that if you need me, you'll know where to find me, as again captured via BBtv. It's just how I do, you know?

(BBtv) Unicorn Chaser, Friday Review: Offworld.com Dirty Dancing Death Dwarf

Brandon Boyer

Bringing Gamma home to you

As you can see from Infinite Ammo's video above, Kokoromi's Gamma3D looks to have gone off without a hitch, with a reported 400 some odd people in attendence, and, as promised, the collective have posted all of the games to their website for your approval -- including Offworld's previously mentioned super HYPERCUBE, and Paper Moon, the excellent planar-platformer from Infinite Ammo themselves (whose lead designer previously worked with Bit Blot on the recently noted Aquaria).

Gamma3D Game Downloads [Kokoromi Collective]

Brandon Boyer

The origin of Bioforge Plus

Feeling a certain affinity having just relocated to Austin, and because I've gone a week without going too terribly retro, I feel inclined to note that former Origin Systems director Jeff Morris has captured and uploaded the original intro cinema (featuring what sounds to be a fantastic Mike 'MST3K' Nelson impersonator) for the long-since-canceled Bioforge Plus add-on.

Morris' YouTube channel is actually a treasure trove of Origin material, with various Wing Commander, Bioforge, and Ultima series ephemera, including an in-costume interview with Lord British himself in full regalia.

As friends-of-Offworld RockPaperShotgun previously mentioned, a terabyte of Origin material landed in the offices of EA Mythic this past summer and was quickly cataloged by ardent fans, quite possibly including the Bioforge Plus source itself. The Artful Gamer blog has more on what's been unearthed so far.

Games That Weren’t » Bioforge Plus intro on YouTube [via GameSetWatch]

Brandon Boyer

Online multiplayer coming to new Aurora Feint

Investor news site VentureBeat has a very lengthy preview on the online multiplayer online features coming to Aurora Feint II, the sequel to the Puzzle Quest meets Tetris Attack iPhone game, which sounds like it's coming together nicely:

One person plays a level of the game (which is, at its heart, a puzzle game) and when he or she is done, sends that data to the game’s servers. As a competitor, you can then download this data (which includes not only scores but also a play-by-play of how the player made his or her moves), and put it into your game, creating a sort of “ghost” competitor...

But what’s cool is that you can actually manipulate the opposing player’s score by making certain moves at the right time. This may seem a bit odd since the other person has already played, but using weapons, you can alter their game and work toward a victory.

Where the first hit was free, Feint's developers are banking on the hope that fans of the original will return for this $10 update, which greatly extends its social networking features.

Aurora Feint II: The Arena brings asynchronous online multi-player gaming to the iPhone [VentureBeat]

Brandon Boyer

Into the mind of the Meijin

Takahashi Meijin is one of those gaming figures who you might have heard of on the periphery but never fully wrapped your mind around -- he was semi recognizably the face of Hudson's Adventure Island series, and indeed has served as the company's spokesman for the past two decades. More amazingly, though, he was the star of Game King, Japan's rough equivalent to 80's NES advermovie The Wizard.

As you can see in this montage, which is self-parodying to the point of near postmodern, the program saw Meijin training for a national Star Soldier championship by honing his famous '16 shot' skills -- the ability to press a NES controller button 16 times a second -- by vibrating tabletops to bring tea-sets closer and, amazingly, exploding a watermelon with just a structure-weakening flick of his hummingbird-flutter fingertip.

All that is prelude to a hat tip toward 1up's Ray Barnholt, who has landed the most extensive English language interview with Takahashi we'll see in some time. In it, he explains how he came to Hudson, his thoughts on the East/West hardcore/casual divide, and confirms that he essentially invented the Turbo-Grafx 16's sliding turbo switches, but, delightfully, kept them limited to 8- and 15-shots a second so no one could steal his crown.

Master Higgins Speaks [1up.com]

Brandon Boyer

WIGI shows off celebrity auction wares

Via some fortuitous Facebook linking we note that tomorrow marks the kick off Women In Games International's celebrity auction, which will run through Sunday the 29th. The list of items up for bid, which you can preview on Bonnie Ruberg's Flickr set, includes items like two legitimately wicked Shepard Fairey designed Civilization Revolution posters signed by Sid Meier, a Bioshock guide signed by Ken Levine, more Witcher, Mass Effect, Gears of War and Halo merch than you've ever seen in one place, and, our favorite: an Electronic Arts watch and keyring so vintage they still use its old 'EOA' square-circle-triangle logo.

The Writers Cabal Blog has more info on finding the appropriate eBay link.

Brandon Boyer

Rez, Lumines dev making N-Gage games?

File this one under wait and see, but when Shuji Utsumi speaks, I listen. Formerly variously VP at Sony Computer Entertainment, Sega and Disney, Utsumi is now CEO of Q Entertainment, the developer behind Lumines, Every Extend Extra and Xbox Live Arcade's Rez revival -- in general, one of the top studios driving music and games closer together outside of Rock Band and Phase creator Harmonix.

So it was with some interest that I noted via his blog that he'd just returned from a quick 'Roman Holiday' to visit the Nokia Games Summit, where he appeared on stage (above) to tell the audience that mobile media would soon be the "center of the media, replacing TV," and, more interestingly, how happy he was to see Nokia working closely with content creators in the area.

Sitting to Utsumi's left is not, as it would appear on first glance, Mythbuster Adam Savage, but instead (you later can hear him referred to in the video) former Eurythmic Dave Stewart (!).

Utsumi notes in his post that Stewart was impressed when he showed off another of Q's music properties, Genki Rockets, who are, in Q's own words, "a music group which vocal is 17 years old girl, Lumi, a first baby born in outer space and has never been to the earth" (and is, in fact, beaming her pop videos to us from 30 years in the future).

So what brings Q and a Eurythmic together? After doing a little further digging, we can see that Stewart attended the games summit as part of the company's "Artists' Advisory Council," where he is helping to introduce "up-and-coming singer Cindy Gomez through [Digital Legends' already-announced N-Gage game Dance Fabulous] with brand new songs including the theme song, 'Street Dancing.'"

But after more digging, we can see that while the studio isn't currently listed, in July of this year Q Entertainment did indeed show up on Nokia's 'Our Developers' list.

So, like I say, file this one under wait and see until we get solid word from an official source -- it could be as simple as Q porting Lumines to the device, as they have to PSP, Xbox Live Arcade, and PC (via Steam) -- but either way, along with the mind-boggling but excellent N-Gage/PC strategy game Reset Generation and the intriguing looking Yamake, Nokia appear to be gathering a solid team beneath their wing.

Brandon Boyer

CERN scientists divert Nihilanth threat

We owe a great debt of gratitude to the Reddit community for supplying scientists at the Large Hadron Collider with their very own crowbar to hold down Earth's fort -- so far as we can tell, that interdimensional rift hasn't yet been torn open so wide that we've been affected on this side of the ocean. From the photo series sent over from CERN labs, though, that's only due to the heroic effort of CERN's very own Swiss Gordon Freeman.

the crowbar arrived at CERN, Freeman received it, world saved [Reddit]

Brandon Boyer

The case for used games

This one passed us by earlier in the week but is still worthy of note: as a number of publishers trend toward curbing used game sales by offering one-time-use download codes for certain value adds (see: the extra 20 songs included in Rock Band 2 for new purchases), Civilization and Spore designer Soren Johnson makes an equally strong case for used sales. Some salient points:

Used game sales are the primary method by which the retail games market is segmented. For quite a few gamers, especially younger ones, used games are their only option for buying games instead of renting them. Keeping these price-sensitive consumers - who will often be tomorrow’s full-price customers - in the retail system and away from piracy is a good thing all around.

[...]

Many factors come into play when a consumer decides if a specific game purchase is worth the money, and one of those factors is the perceived value from selling it back as a used game. In other words, people will pay more for a new game because they know they can get some of that money back when they trade it in at the local Gamestop. Importantly, this perceived value exists whether the consumer actually sells the game or keeps it. Wizards of the Coast has long admitted that the existence of the secondary market for Magic cards has long helped buoy the primary market because buyers perceive that the cards have monetary value.

His caveat, though, is that in order to maintain that perceived value of traditional retail games, digital download services (which it would seem we're all growing much more comfortable with) have to lower their own prices in turn. Hit the link below for the full argument and following lengthy conversation in the comments.

DESIGNER NOTES » Blog Archive » The Case for Used Games

Brandon Boyer

The bike hero that wasn't

By now you've probably seen the viral Bike Hero video recently linked via our gadget loving bretheren, and by now you've probably sussed out that it was indeed a highly staged hoax, from the same agency behind Marc Ecko's alleged Air Force graffiti-bomb, and that might have left you feeling a bit cold.

Friend of Offworld, interesting-web-thing-maker, and keen link-smith Tom Armitage at Infovore sums up the disappointment nicely:

Why don’t marketers and advertisers understand that, sometimes, the target audience for this kind of thing will like it just as much if it’s honest about being advertising? It’s a lovely piece of footage, and it ties into the garage-band, DIY ethos well; it’s a good fit for the Guitar Hero brand. As it is, I’m disappointed because I now know this wasn’t the product of hard-working fans, wanting to promote a product they love; it was the product of a lot of time/effort from people with money to spend on time/effort.

As a long-time appreciator and equal-part promoter of smart -- but transparent -- advertising, I couldn't agree more.

Infovore » Bike Hero-gate

Brandon Boyer

By pressing down a special key it plays a little melody

There's a fantastic meta-game the Nintendo elite like to play with every game scored by long-time company composer Kazumi Totaka, who is oft-noted as the not entirely coincidental spitting image of Animal Crossing's K.K. Slider (the dog's Japanese name, Totakeke, being a bastardization of Totaka's name).

Totaka has notoriously been hiding a vaguely arabesque 19-note melody in each game he's worked on, from import-only original Game Boy game X (notably created by now-PixelJunk Monsters/Eden studio head Dylan Cuthbert) through more recent DS and GameCube games.

And so, after only days of searching, the song -- known simply as Totaka's Song -- has been discovered in the Wii's new Animal Crossing title, City Folk. Sitting idle in Kapp'n's opening-scene bus for enough time will net you the whistled reward.

More on the phenomenon can be found via YouTube user 'PhilBond's three part series exhaustively cataloging the appearances.

Animal Crossing City Folk- Kapp'n Whistles Totaka's Song [YouTube, via Tiny Cartridge]

Brandon Boyer

Obama's new Tauran Shaman of staff

Over at the Mother Boing, Xeni notes that Obama's just-appointed FCC transition team co-chair Kevin Werbach has been recognized as verifiable "virtual worlds nut" and World of Warcraft Level 70 Tauren Shaman Supernovan Jenkins, along with a breakdown of just what that affiliation means:

What does this tell us about him, as a person, as a gamer, as a government official? I will attempt to translate all the dorkese.

1. - CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Every player in WoW belongs to one of two warring factions, Alliance or Horde. Werbach is Horde. Children often choose to be Alliance because they perceive them as "the good guys", but students of history (both ours and Azeroth's) recognize that Alliance culture is based on medieval European culture and Horde culture is based on the indigenous cultures that were supplanted by the West.

Werbach is a Tauren (a minotaur), which basically makes him a Native Kalimdorian. The Tauren revere nature, living in wigwams near giant totem poles. As a Shaman (see below), he could also have chosen a troll (blue-skinned Jamaican-like monster) or an orc (green-skinned Klingon-like monster), so there must be something about the cow-man that appeals to his liberal guilt.

Warcraft Identity of Obama's FCC Transition Team Co-Chair Revealed, Analyzed

Brandon Boyer

Weapon of Choice, the game that crash-landed from 1992

While there hasn't been nearly enough time since the New Xbox Experience update landed to fully dig into all of the new community games it has also brought with it, one game has jumped out ahead of the pack both in terms of sales (it's currently, according to the new dashboard's sorting options, the most popular community title) and in wider recognition over the past few days.

That game is Weapon of Choice, which seems to exemplify precisely what Microsoft's community games campaign was set up to do: giving passionate one-person teams their platform for indie success. Industry news site Gamasutra talked with that one person, Nathan Fouts (who recently gave up his position at Resistance: Fall of Man creator Insomniac to form his startup, Mommy's Best Games) where he admitted that his game wasn't up to snuff to be accepted into the Xbox Live Arcade program proper, but perfectly fit the community game mantra.

Weapon of Choice is, at heart, a game you've played before -- again and again and again, especially if you had your roots in early computer games -- a bombastic and testosterone-drenched side-scrolling shooter with a ludicrous sci-fi storyline, blaring guitar riffs and multiple-screen-filling bosses. It's so filled with the vitality of a singular vision, though -- Fouts pulled in help with music and scriptwriting, but otherwise took the reins on all its art, programming and sound effects -- that it's hard to escape its auteur, throwback charm.

That's not to say that it hasn't brought anything new to the table: apart from handling as fluidly as a 16-bit shooter should on modern hardware, Fouts packed a few very smart gameplay aces up his sleeve. The first is 'death brushing,' a ubiquitous 'bullet-time' trick that zooms in on and slows down the action when you're very near death (as you will be, often -- Choice's screens are chaotic with over and undersized alien enemies all squelching and squeezing various fluids and particles from themselves at any given moment), allowing you to make narrow and stylish escapes.

For those moments where death brushing hadn't worked out as well as you'd hoped, once you've died the game calls up a 'vengeance missile,' which, before you've called your next character into play, gives you a one shot first-person-bullseye-targeted chance to eliminate whatever it was that'd brought you down before.

Finally, the game gives you the chance to rescue that downed character that you've just replaced by slinging them -- or other downed operatives you've find on the field -- over your shoulder and carrying them to end-of-level safety, bringing about tough choices about who you decide to leave behind. It's not until you've depleted your stock of rescued characters that the game is truly over.

It's no surprise that, according to the interview with Fouts, his recently rediscovered teenage game design sketches share an uncanny similarity to game he's just created: Weapon of Choice is that game that the disaffected youth of the Psygnosis/Factor 5/Epic MegaGames/Apogee shareware era had always dreamed of making, and all the more glorious for it.

Weapon of Choice [Mommy's Best Games, YouTube trailer]

Brandon Boyer

Preview the NXE's Premium Themes

Now that nearly everyone has signed on for Microsoft's New Xbox Experience dashboard update, the community has been putting itself to good use. Above and beyond simple background pictures, the NXE allows developers to create their own premium themes that also decorate the spaces occupied by your now avatar-ized friends, the hitch being that you can't preview a theme before you purchase.

The members of the otherwise raucous NeoGAF forum, though, have solved that with good (or, in some cases, you know, good enough) photos of each, letting me see that why, yes, I think I do want The Behemoth's Castle Crashers theme.

The Official NXE PREMIUM THEME SHOWCASE [NeoGAF]

Brandon Boyer

2.8 million sign on for more World of Warcraft in 24 hours

At a clip that the company says makes it "the fastest-selling PC game of all time," and clearly showing no signs of slowing down in the nearly four years since its original release, publishing juggernaut Activision Blizzard says World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King has sold more than 2.8 million copies in its first 24 hours, eclipsing January 2007's Burning Crusade expansion record of 2.4 million copies in the same time.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King [Blizzard]

Brandon Boyer

Digital Pictures augmenting your reality with Papervision

Oh! What a time to have a busted web cam and a printer packed firmly away: while we wait patiently to see just how lovable Sony's curiously Monchichi-esque EyePet will be, Digital Pictures Interactive have released the first stirrings of their own bespoke version which you can interact with now by printing a reference spot and training your webcam to your desk.

The studio is the same one behind their earlier Save Your Sensible campaign that also uses Papervision3D tech to do realtime 3D animation in Flash, utilizing, they say, "a file format originally created for first person shooter video games from 10 years ago (id Software's Quake 2)."

The games potential for this type of augmented reality is obviously quite high, and while Sony is one of the few big players currently dabbling in it (also with their card RPG Eye of Judgment), we also have big hopes for Nintendo to do the same with the now camera-enabled DSi.

Let us know how you get on with your creature via the comments.

Papervision - Augmented Reality [Digital Pictures Interactive]

Brandon Boyer

Offworld BBtv premiere: What's Offworld?

After an oxygen fire knocked our interstellar video link temporarily out of commission, we bring you our Boing Boing TV premiere via Azeroth, where my spiritual Death Knight equal gives you a little background on where we're is coming from and where I hope to steer the ship. As usual, here's the direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable rather than the Flash.

Offworld bonus fact: in real life, my eyes and sword glow a much more vivid shade of blue. That is indeed, though, almost exactly how I shake a tail feather.

Brandon Boyer

ngmoco shows off iPhone's Dr. Awesome, Dropship

After a slight snafu yesterday that saw the latest trailer for Hand Circus's highly anticipated puzzle/platformer Rolando yanked just minutes before I'd posted it, iPhone publisher ngmoco has released new trailers for its two upcoming "fast apps" (lower price-tier games like their free Maze Finger and 99 cent Topple): Dr. Awesome, Microsurgeon M.D. and Dropship.

The wonderful part of Dr. Awesome? It's not the over-dramatic Phoenix Wright/Trauma Center portrait art, or the Qix-like gameplay, it's the fact that you're performing surgery on your friends, as imported from your phone's address book.

As for Dropship, I've got a strong suspicion that touching will be believing -- I've been miming my fingers overlaid on top of the video trying to get a feel for how it works and though it's not quite connected yet, I'm suitably enamored with its radiant vector design.

ngmoco:)

Check out the gameplay trailer video for Dr. Awesome after the jump.

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

Google shuttering virtual world Lively

Sad news today for Lively enthusiasts as Google announces that it intends to shutter its 3D online world service to "focus more on our core search, ads and apps business."

I'd just talked with creative director Kevin Hanna of X-Ray Kid, the studio headed by Marvel and The Batman cartoon series artist Jeff Matsuda, in September, who had revealed at the Austin Game Developers Conference that the project's then-long-term goals included opening Lively's API to developers, hoping to make it a ubiquitous browser-embedded 3D platform for games.

X-Ray Kid, for their part, updated just days ago saying they were at work on "a large number of different, diverse and wonderful projects," so presumably they'll survive the blow. More discussion on the closing can be found at virtual worlds blog Terranova and at Metaplace creator Raph Koster's blog.

Official Google Blog: Lively no more [Google]

Brandon Boyer

Grand Theft Auto Gets Lost

With October and November's dogpile of blockbusters, it's easy to forget that the year started off with a proper bang with Grand Theft Auto IV. As the release of PC version of the game draws nearer, Rockstar has started to show off the extensive power of that version's exclusive video editor and video sharing -- and we're genuinely excited for the wave of machinima to follow, if only because we're secretly hopeful for more Philip Glass-scored video and more footage of the everyday/mundane side of Liberty City.

But for Xbox 360 owners, today brings first official word via USAToday on the subject and release date of the first downloadable episode, which this time will focus only marginally on Niko, instead giving players the vantage point of one of the original game's cameo stars:

This new episode, available Feb. 17 via download exclusively for those who own the Xbox 360 version (no price yet), stars Johnny Klebitz, a member of Liberty City biker gang The Lost.

"Johnny is a very different character than Niko, with a very different background," says Dan Houser, vice president of creative development for Rockstar Games. "I can't go into too much detail on the story, because we try not to give away too much plot before the game is released. But I can say that the story will show you a different side of Liberty City."

Grand Theft Auto IV [Rockstar]

Brandon Boyer

Blip Fest headed to NYC December 4-7

While it might be too regrettably late to make a last minute journey to Montreal for tonight's previously mentioned Gamma 3D, before you pull a low-bit four-color freakout (as above), I'll note that there's still plenty of time to plan for NYC's forthcoming BlipFest, the December 4-7th celebration of NES, C64, Atari ST, and Game Boy "chipmusic and its related disciplines."

The schedule is all still TBA, so I can't yet point toward any single can't-miss night, but the overall line-up is star-studded enough that any night's a sure bet for something a little bit amazing.

BlipFestival2008

Brandon Boyer

Atlus bringing Trackmania DS stateside

Today's award for Most Unlikely Publisher goes to RPG stalwarts Atlus, who have just announced they'll be bringing Firebrand Games' Trackmania DS to the U.S. in March of 2009, and even for 'just-slightly' casual fans of racing games, this should be happy news.

It's no mistake that the franchise has one of the largest and most dedicated audiences in the genre: the series excels at joyfully purist arcade design mixed with puzzle and stunt elements and a fully-featured track editor, all of which, European reviews have very happily reported, have perfectly made their way to the portable version. Essentially, if you have any nostalgia for racing classics like Stunts and Racing Destruction Set, or, quite simply, like to move things quickly around a track and make awesome jumps and loop-de-loops, this is the game you want.

Try the free Steam version, Trackmania Nations Forever, for a taste of what the fuss is about.

Trackmania DS [Atlus]

Brandon Boyer

Celebrate Half-Life anniversary for less than a dollar

As if on cue, seconds after posting the previous entry, word arrives that Valve have dropped Half-Life's price on Steam to 98 cents in celebration of the 1998 release:

Launched 10 years ago today, Half-Life was greeted with overwhelming review scores (Metacritic of 96%), earned over 50 Game of the Year Awards, and birthed a franchise with over 20 million units sold to date. The special 10 year anniversary price is available via Steam until 12:01 pm PST on November 21.

Half-Life [Valve]

Brandon Boyer

A fresh look at Black Mesa's Half-Life remake

On the 10th anniversary of the release of Valve's original Half Life, mod team Black Mesa Modification has released a slew of new work in progress screenshots of their detailed remake of the game in the current Orange Box engine, which, if the mod ever sees the day, will easily lead to our third or fourth playthrough. Says the team:

2008 has been a very eventful year for us. Making a 12+ hour game is a monumental task, but we're still powering ahead with development and making great progress. Our programmers have been hard at work overhauling and expanding the AI, and lots of our NPCs have been brought to life by our talented voice actors. Levels and chapters continue to be worked on and fine tuned, with large sections strung together and playable.

[...]

Last but not least, the team worked very hard to get a trailer out along with all the other media. But as we've always done when faced with the choice, we decided to take a few extra days to polish it to a mirror shine before releasing it to the community. Be sure and look for that in the days ahead!

A celebration of the last decade! [Black Mesa Modifications]

Brandon Boyer

A quick toast to the death of Blueprint

EA Blueprint was my favorite division of the publishing giant that I was never fully sure existed, and, according to a new expose on Variety's games blog Cut Scene, never officially did and now surely will not. What I did know, or had gathered piecemeal from various sources was that it involved producers Neil Young (whose work had quite rightly given me the outright creeps in college when I'd beta tested his Majestic, many moons before we'd all properly learn the acronym ARG) and Alan Yu.

I did know that it had had within its scope the creation of cross-platform games (beyond console ports: most excitingly, a dip into social games, as it did by extending last year's Wii trivia game Smarty Pants to Facebook), and the ability to bring Stephen Spielberg into the building and walk out with the Wii's Boom Blox, an almost entirely unlikely game to come from such a major Hollywood producer.

Blox, which Variety posits will now be getting a sequel, had an energy and a fundamental delight in core mechanics -- you do, after all, do little more than explore play possibilities inside a very simple block-and-ball physics engine, just for the pleasure of watching things topple and explode -- that could easily have come from a passionate indie.

I knew there was a worrying pall in the air nearly a year ago when I'd heard whispers that both Young and Yu were planning an exit from the company, but it wasn't until only very recently that we'd find out why, when they founded the iFund-backed iPhone startup ngmoco, which, even just two games so far in, shows more promise at understanding what makes gaming on the platform unique than most others.

Knowing what we know now from the Variety article at the start of this year, I might have been worried for EA having "shuttered" what felt like its most exciting prospect, but with newly announced projects like Kyle Gray's DS puzzle/platformer Henry Hatsworth and the 'wonder-triplet-powers, unite!' EA Partners deal that will bring together No More Heroes and Killer 7 developer Grasshopper Manufacture, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami, and, peripherally, Rez, Lumines and Meteos developer Q Entertainment, my worries have been almost fully abated.

Electronic Arts shuts down Blueprint, making Boom Blox 2 [Variety]

Brandon Boyer

Introversion playing with fire with unbeatable DEFCON AI

Apparently having learned nothing from Hollywood history, indie developers Introversion have put out a public call for AI students to create an unbeatable computer opponent who can mutually assure total destruction in their serenely-terrifying 2006 real-time wargame DEFCON.

The fab-four have been working with The Imperial College Department of Computing and API creator Robin Baumgarten (interviewed here on the subject) to push the development of DEFCON AI in academic study, and Baumgarten has made the that API publicly available inviting everyone to, as Introversion put it (to our horror), "write the most efficient killing machine."

DEFCON [Introversion Software]

Brandon Boyer

Scott Thompson (barely) passes a Portal challenge

We're always thrilled to see our cross-cultural interests fortuitously converge, so forgive us this latest Kids In The Hall MySpace tour video, in which Scott Thompson proves himself about as adept at handling Portal's Companion Cube as he was at taking care of his Sony Aibo -- that is to say (if you haven't watched the Kids' 'Same Guys, New Dresses' DVD), not at all.

Scott in a horrible mood flees to the back of the tour bus. [via Kotaku]

Brandon Boyer

A Brief History of Rhythm

Why do we like UK games journo Simon 'chewingpixels' Parkin? First, and most obviously, because he's taken the time to prepare this exhaustive timeline charting the evolving course of rhythm games, and second, though it doesn't appear in the timeline, he has correctly called out 1987 Famicom Disk System game Otocky (from Electroplankton /Tenori-On creator Toshio Iwai) as one of the true groundbreakers (as well as included some uber-obscurities like PlayStation 2 title Dog of Bay). He explains, though, on Otocky's absence, as well as notable others:

I’ve limited the list to rhythm-action games in the strictest sense, that is, games in which you time inputs to match prerecorded music. So there’s no Rez, ElectroPlankton or WiiMusic, titles in which a player’s inputs do create musical outputs, but not necessarily in a scored or timed framework.

We have to go back and check again to see if they break the rules, but we might have a few additions -- Agetec's recent DS title Rhythm 'n Notes springs quickly to mind, as well as Wonderswan Color game Rhyme Rider Kerorican and the forthcoming Major Minor's Majestic March (both from Parappa creator NanaOn-Sha) , as well as at least one other original PlayStation obscurity which is escaping us at the moment.

chewing pixels » The Rhythm-Action Timeline

Brandon Boyer

Only on Offworld: Polytron/Kokoromi's Anaglyphic super HYPERCUBE

Montreal collective Kokoromi's GAMMA games and music events are quickly becoming the top neo-future salons for art/game curation (last year's event saw the release of Jason Rohrer's low-res memento mori Passage, which quickly circulated as one of the most thought provoking games of the year), and it's easy to understand why they've made 3D the subject of this year's show: Kokoromi co-founder Phil Fish has spent the majority of the past few years playing with that dimension as one of the minds behind the forthcoming indie platformer Fez.

If you haven't yet been exposed to Fez, a quick recap. Starting off as an otherwise innocently and nostalgically charming low-res 2D pixel platformer, Fez's central conceit revolves (no pun intended) around giving the player control of an otherwise hidden axis that fwoom's the world into the third dimension, re-aligning the position of 2D element and letting you venture deeper into its levels. It's a difficult mechanic to put properly into words, but one that is genuinely jaw-dropping the first time it's performed, and utilized to a more logical and involving extent than seen in the Wii's similarly dimensionally screwy Super Paper Mario.

For this year's GAMMA, then, the collective invited the indie developer community to get just as playful with the third dimension, only, in true retro-futurist Kokoromi style, limited developers to using only red/blue stereoscopy and explore, as they put it, "alternative depth and location cues" and the "ability to hide information in separate viewing channels."

Kokoromi themselves -- consisting of programmer Damien Di Fede, Fish, creative director and researcher Heather Kelley (who you might remember from her "magical pet adventure and stealthy primer on female sexual pleasure," Lapis, and digital media theorist Cindy Poremba -- together with Polytron programmer Renaud Bédard, set out to up their own 3D ante and have created, Offworld can exclusively reveal ahead of the event, super HYPERCUBE.

Kelley explains, "The gameplay of super HYPERCUBE is kind of like that "human Tetris" event on those Japanese game shows... but with cubes. You have a cluster of procedurally generated cubes right in front of you, and your goal is to quickly line it up to fit through the hole in the wall that's moving toward you, by rotating the cluster with the controller."

"To see the hole in the wall on the other side of the cluster (and thus figure out what direction to rotate the cube to line it up) you have to lean," Kelley continues, "The better you play, the bigger the cluster gets, and so the further you need to lean in order to see the wall behind." Simple enough, but -- and here's where their true innovation comes into play -- to implement that leaning, Polytron's Bédard took a cue from Carnegie Mellon researcher Johnny Lee's famous Wii-mote head tracking concept, and hacked together a pair of stereoscope glasses that lets players literally lean to navigate their way around the space.

The short videos we've seen of the experience appear just the tiniest bit magical -- the combination of anaglyph 3D with movement-based perspective, on top of the game's slickly minimalist style reminiscent of nothing so much as early PlayStation puzzler Intelligent Qube perfectly fits that Kokoromi retro future vision. It's not hard to imagine the 70's early game pioneers predicting that this would be the shape of games to come.

The 'super' version of super HYPERCUBE will be playable one night only at tonight's event, but, Kelley says, a version simply called HYPERCUBE which uses the Xbox 360 controller to lean will be released after the show, as will the games from its other selected developers, including Infinite Ammo's Paper Moon, Lee Byron and Joannie Wu's Fireflies, Tim Winsky and Johanna Arcand's AltiToad, Jim McGinley's The Depths To Which I Sink, and Antony Blackett, Corie Geerders, and James Everett's BlottoBrace.

GAMMA 3D takes place tonight at 9pm EST, at Montreal's Society for Arts and Technology (the SAT).

Brandon Boyer

Othello gets Puzzle Quest treatment with Neopets Puzzle Adventure

Readers over a certain age will be forgiven a healthy dose of skepticism in accepting that a game featuring Neopets -- the plush animal franchise which includes a digital version of each toy to interact with online (which anyone with an acquaintance under that certain age will likely be familiar with) -- might be the next to occupy an inordinate amount of their time.

But anyone that's lost a chunk of their life to Puzzle Quest, the 2007 RPG/puzzle game that's touched as many people through word of mouth as it has platforms that will take it (the count currently stands at PC, PS2, PSP, PS3, Wii, Xbox Live Arcade, and mobile phones) will also understand that developer Infinite Interactive has an uncanny ability to tap into that lizard brain sector of the human psyche and keep it dead-locked for hours at a time.

And so it will likely go with Neopets Puzzle Adventure, an online demo of which Capcom has just released. Like Puzzle Quest's embedding of an essential 'Bejeweled' match-three core inside a complex RPG framework, Puzzle Adventure does the same with the classic game of Othello.

What you don't get in the demo version is the taste of the new game's true complexity: like Puzzle Quest's spells, Adventure will require you to capture and train 'petpets' and find items that throw curveballs into the otherwise straightforward Reversi design, but what you will get, (or at least, I did) is the first thrill of an absolutely crushing victory you've had against an AI controlled Othello opponent in as long as you can remember.

Capcom plans to bring the online playable game to DS and PC in late November.

Neopets Puzzle Adventure demo [Capcom]

Brandon Boyer

Bedroom, are you ready to rock?: Dead Kennedys edition

Though I'm sure there's no way I'll be able to nail Jello Biafra's tight-throated warble, there still beats a sliver of my idealistic 15 year old heart that was born ready to snarl my way through Rock Band's just-released Dead Kennedys pack ("California Über Alles," "Holiday in Cambodia," and "Police Truck"), which will surely be the game's most-bleeped release to date.

Other releases this week include a Mission of Burma pack ("That's When I Reach For My Revolver," "Mica," and "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate"), the Century Media Girls of Metal Pack 01 ("Closer" and "Swamped" by Lacuna Coil, and "Forever" by In This Moment) and Crooked X's "Gone."

Rock Band: Various Tracks [Rock Band]

Brandon Boyer

Discriminating Nintendo prizes for Japan's discriminating tastes

Right, sorry Nintendo fans, it's time to get jealous: Nintendo of Japan has just announced this year's prizes for Platinum and Gold members of its Club Nintendo service, which lets players trade in points earned from buying Wii and DS games.

This year's Nintenderati will be able to choose from a gold-plated Mario Kart wheel, a life-sized puffy polyester Mario hat, and the slightly more subdued desk calendar set, none of which, the internet has decided (and we wholly agree) are quite as outright desirable as last year's classic reproduction Super Nintendo controller for the Wii, or (my personal favorite), the laser-etched personalized Wii-mote battery cover adorned with the grinning visage of your Mii.

There's still hope, though, earlier this year Nintendo of America announced that it would be bringing Club Nintendo to the States, and, unlike Europe's version -- which sees a paucity of prizes distributed to a handful of people while the rest have to vie for desktop pictures and icons -- will be, according to a recent interview with MTV, "weighted more toward physical goods."

Brandon Boyer

EA tosses new parts into Spore patch

Celebrating the release of its first expansion, the Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack, EA has revealed that the latest Spore patch, which otherwise fixes achievement syncing and Sporepedia background issues will also come with a small selection of 24 additional limbs, including Lesser Tubercles, Sinew Slugs, Humorous Humeruses (Humerii?), and the Proprioceptive Flex -- a word you should all now be intimately familiar with having read Clive Thompson's look into his motion sickness issues with Mirror's Edge.

Spore Patch 3 -- With 24 free creature limbs! [EA]

Brandon Boyer

The promise Lips holds

Inspired by the latest trailer for the game, we've got to admit, we're frankly a bit worried for Microsoft's soon to be released karaoke game Lips: it's got a lot to prove, being released into this post-Rock Band, post-SingStar environment -- despite the promise of both its motion sensitive performance based play and letting you use your own music collection for an essentially limitless song selection.

But there's good reason to have some hope: developer iNiS is one of rhythm gaming's underdogs worth rooting for. The acoustic serenade in their sweetly ridiculous PlayStation 2 (and later PSP) game Gitaroo Man is a sappy but affecting, heart-tugging genre moment leagues away from the usual rawk-out star fantasy that music games (including the rest of Gitaroo itself) normally and happily provide. It's also a moment that has yet to be matched -- the closest anyone has come since is iNiS themselves, with various suddenly emotional scenes spread across their similarly over-the-top DS Elite Beat Agents/Ouendan franchise.

Essentially, iNiS gets that personal connection between music and the listener, and especially between the serenader and the serenaded. That feeling seemed to come through in Lips' debut commercial (once that initial shock of -- Hey! Peter Bjorn and John! They are a somewhat obscure band whom I also have in my iTunes! -- wore off), though we're still and forever devastated that the girl passed the mic and wandered away, leaving someone to hijack The Moment with their Zune and devolve the budding romance into a generic house party.

Lips is due out this week, and we'll update you with full details of what it ultimately has or hasn't brought to the genre -- and of any hard-won affections gained in the course of play -- at a later date.

Brandon Boyer

2D Boy's World of Goo: The community updates

Like Valve's instant-classic Portal, 2D Boy's brilliant WiiWare/PC debut World of Goo wrapped what might otherwise be simple tests of physical derring-do into one of this year's smartest and most subversive storylines -- every bit as blackly comedic as the tar-balls themselves. But, also as with Portal, its carefully crafted structure somewhat dampens its replayability, retreading levels without that narrative grip.

And, short of forthcoming expansions from 2D Boy themselves, so it is that it's the community to the rescue: on top of an open-source level editor currently in development, a group of enterprising Dutch have created an unofficial community site for Goo players.

Upping the ante on 2D Boy's own automatically updated leaderboard site, uploading your PC/Mac/Linux save file to the community site not only stacks you against the competition, but lets players get a glimpse of your whole history with the game. Even better, the site automatically keeps a preview image updated of the top ten towers from the Tower of Goo meta-game, letting you marvel at the true engineering prowess at work.

Brandon Boyer

Development continues on Oddworld's most promising project

Fantastic news coming out of a recent round of developments at Oddworld Inhabitants: as Brash Entertainment folds and former COO Larry Shapiro becomes president of Oddworld, leaving former president and co-founder Lorne Lanning to focus solely on creative tasks, other co-founder Sherry McKenna has told UK news site GamesIndustry.biz that its long-quiet game/CG film project Citizen Siege is still in development, though now without former animation partner Vanguard, headed by John 'Shrek' Williams.

Why the excitement? Following on the relatively more tame environmental politics ever present in the series of Oddworld games, Citizen Siege -- first hinted at in 2004 and later announced in 2006 at UK festival GameCity in what (it's thankfully becoming easier to forget) was a significantly darker political period -- was sounding like Oddworld's most alluringly savage but ultimately hopeful work to date, spanning, Lanning said at the time, "martial law and the diminishment of civil liberties," and later adding:

1984's a little dark, whereas this is really about the power of the human spirit and the potential of the individual. Anyone familiar with our previous work knows that that's always a strong underlying tone in the worlds that we create. This will be no different--it's just in a more relevant world. It's really a story about an everyman, a very common man who becomes something he never could have dreamed of through first unfortunate circumstances and then taking off the blinders to the world that he really lives in.

It's still not clear what form the property will eventually take, the Siege universe was said as recently as last year to cover at least one game, Wage Wars, on top of its video properties, but add to that the re-emergence of the Oddworld franchise itself, and all that remains is for Microsoft to help bring Oddworld Stranger, quite possibly the last great Xbox title, to the Xbox 360's Originals digital download program, and we'd have a holy trinity from one of the consistently smartest developers working in games today.

Brandon Boyer

Bit Blot bring indie-hit Aquaria to Macs

Mac gamers may have finally gotten their big break: indie developer Bit Blot has announced that its debut adventure game, Aquaria, has made the jump to the platform nearly a year after the release of the PC original. For those that may have already forgotten, the game took home the grand prize at the 2007 Independent Games Festival, a well deserved award, as Bit Blot put together one of indie gaming's most ambitious works that year -- a sprawling, gesture-controlled underwater adventure that felt warmly familiar to fans of Metroid's incrementally revealed worlds.

What's more, Bit Blot says the Mac version isn't just a simple port:

Aquaria for Mac includes nearly a year of work in new features, bug fixes and improvements - bringing the version number up from 1.0.3 to a big shiny 1.1.0. With new and beautiful wide screen support; a new world map system complete with progress recording, location names, user-created markers and beacons, user-friendly improvements to the cooking system, changes to make puzzles more intuitive, additional graphics, auto updates, a built-in help system - and more! Even some of the music tracks got a bit of polish.

They add that while all of the new features and updates will eventually be coming to the PC version, they're not in a great rush to release a patch as "a small gift to our patient Mac fans who have waited many months."

Aquaria 1.1.0 for Mac Released! [Bit Blot]

Brandon Boyer

Welcome to Offworld

Hi everybody, I'm Brandon, and this is Offworld.

A little about me: I've worn a lot of different hats over the past several years in trying to lead my wild, pure, simple life, running an indie record label, working as an artist and programmer, and, more recently, contributing to and editing various games magazines and websites like Edge and Gamasutra.

As Offworld lifts off over the coming weeks and months, I'll be bringing to it a focus on the overlooked, the underappreciated, the rise of the independents and, in general, the games that are bringing genuine excitement and innovation (in both gameplay and design) to the industry.

Offworld will also be home to a number of guest appearances by and regular features from people outside the games industry proper and those that have had only marginal influence but deserve more, because it's when those influences come in that the results have been some of the most magical and memorable, from illustrator Rodney Alan Greenblat and Masaya Matsuura's unforgettable Parappa the Rapper (the face that would launch the rhythm gaming genre proving so profitable today), to studio artist Toshio Iwai's musical Electroplankton, to Keita Takahashi's Katamari Damacy.

That's not to say that Offworld won't also be exploring and featuring gaming's blockbusters, powerhouses and the history of its respected decades-old institutions, but in general we hope to chase away a lot of the industry's cynicism and myopia that's set in and bring the joy of discovery and a fresh breath of playfulness and wonder back, because we're all in this to have fun, aren't we?

[Laugh-Out-Loud Cats guest appearance courtesy Adam 'Apelad' Koford]

Joel Johnson

Thanks for stopping by. Also, the comments are broken. But not for long! Update: Comments working!

Putting together the launch of Offworld has been a surprisingly carefree process for me...because I've barely lifted a finger. We'd never left our berth were it not for the assistance of our support crew. Thanks to Jonathan Schreiber and Ken Snider for providing technical infrastructure support (esp. Jonathan, who swooped in to help us tie our comments in to the rest of Boing Boing even though it wasn't his responsibility); Derek, Xeni, and Jolon from BBtv (you'll see why soon!); Cory and Alice for their great ideas and exuberance; Mark and Carla for letting us play around inside the great Boing Boing mothership; Jim Rossignol, who has helped us hone our editorial tack right from the start; Leigh Alexander, who kept us thinking of new angles of attack (and kept us fed); we shouldn't forget our friends at Kotaku and Destructoid, none of whom have any idea we're launching this thing (hi!).

Of course, this entire endeavor is made possible with advertising support from Intel. We'd wanted to launch a gaming adjunct to our gadgets coverage for ages; Intel has done nothing but encourage us to come up with new ways to create a wonderful place for our community to play together. (And you haven't seen half of what we're planning on doing throughout the upcoming months.) And thanks, as well, to Federated Media for putting it all together, especially Jason Ratner, Mugs Buckley, and Matt Jessell.

A special thanks to Eliza Gauger, who suggested the name "Offworld" to me for a gaming site a couple of years ago. It has stuck with me ever since.

My fellow Gadgets editors have been essential: Brownlee held the fort while I tinkered. And it is no exaggeration to say that if Rob Beschizza hadn't been part of the team this site would not be launching today. Invaluable.

Anyway, sheesh, it's not an Oscar or anything. Thank you to everyone — especially you, for giving us a shot. I hope you like what you find and I look forward to playing lots of games with you all.

One final note: The comments are kind of borked at the moment. But they should be fixed here soon. My fault — I didn't realize getting MT logins working across multiple domains would be a problem, but smarter people are working as we speak to fix it. Or as I speak, I mean.

Update: Comments are working just fine now. Thanks so much, Ivan and Jonathan!

Brandon Boyer

Pixel on with Meggy Jr RGB

As originally pointed to on the Mother Boing, electronics kit manufacturers Evil Mad Scientist have announced that its Meggy Jr RGB handheld gaming kit will be shipping this week. If your homebrew skills have been hampered by too many fancy pixels and colors, you'll be pleased to learn that the Meggy Jr comes in at just 8x8 LEDs, looking nothing so much like the kid-friendly Game Boy version of Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On.

Meggy will ship with EMS's own "pixel-blasting side-scrolling shoot-em-up" Attack of the Cherry Tomatoes, and we fully expect to see your own low-res rainbow-light creations over coming months.

Meggy Jr RGB [Evil Mad Scientists]

Brandon Boyer

Nokia gaming up reality with Yamake

It seems likely that LittleBigPlanet has cemented 2008's legacy as the breakout year for bringing user-generated content to games, but on the even-littler side, Nokia and UK mobile developer Gameware have been making strides to do the same with Yamake, Nokia's N-Gage game that it says will let players make and share mini-games from photo and video content created on their phone, sounding not entirely unlike the WarioWare Myself project Nintendo is preparing for its camera-enhanced DSi.

While Nokia's been somewhat tight-lipped on just what Yamake will offer, they have geared up on the participatory side with the Yamake Art Project, a promotional campaign curating vinyl toy customs of the game's soft-form mascot, and, even more wonderfully, the above reality-enhanced video from Helsinki motion-graphics studio Fake.

Yamake Art Project [Nokia]

Brandon Boyer

Harvey James's Mother 3 fan art vanguard

On top of the already massive archives of fan art the Earthbound community has produced over the series' lifespan, the release of the third game's previously mentioned unofficial translation has already kicked off a new wave of inspired illustration, most notably so far Harvey James' latest takes on the game's porcine villains, the Pig Mask Army.

A massive collection of Harvey's fantastic retro and manga-inspired work can be found at his website, including our favorite, this T-shirt design for soon-to-be-launched games inspired fashion outlet Attract Mode.

Mother 3 Pig Mask Desktops [Harvey James]

Brandon Boyer

Charting load time improvements with NXE hard drive installs

One of the most intriguing features of Microsoft's New Xbox Experience is the ability to install and launch games from the Xbox 360's hard drive. Our own tests have proven the feature has made trawling Fallout 3's Wasteland that much more seamless, but Binge Gamer has set up the first beta-tested chart to denote just how much, showing (if currently somewhat anecdotally) improvements on the order of 30 percent to, simply, "a lot faster."

So how much time are you saving? - Xbox 360 NXE Hard Drive Install Chart [Binge Gamer]

Brandon Boyer

An essential addition to your Wasteland Survival Guide

By now you might already know the terrain like the back of your hand, but Planet Fallout's recently launched user edited Capital Wasteland Google map is digging even further into the minutiae packed into every crevice of Fallout 3's DC metro area, with growing guides to all of the special weapons, Enclave outposts, and easter eggs Bethesda have snuck in.

Fallout 3 Capital Wasteland Map [Planet Fallout]

Jim Rossignol

Ragdoll Metaphysics: Left 4 Dead, The Thinking Man's Braindead Shooter

"It's totally worth giving up TV real estate to be able to punch your buddy in the shoulder during friendly fire incidents," says Valve's Left 4 Dead development frontman, Chet Faliszek. He's talking about the split-screen mode on the Xbox 360 version of the spectacular multiplayer zombie shooter - something that inquisitive players recently dug out of the PC demo code. As it turns out, the PC will actually support that split screen version too, although you might need someone on an Xbox pad and someone on mouse and keyboard to make it work.

I was lucky enough to sit down and play the full game on a high-end PC with a huge Dell monitor, alongside three of my closest friends, all of whom had a similar rig. Ideal conditions, you might say, for a four-player PC shooter. Especially since we were playing against Valve themselves... But however you intend to play this game, you're definitely going to get a special kind of kick out of it. The 360 version (there will be nothing on PS3) has already generated massive interest, and Faliszek revealed that early numbers outweigh even the pre-orders of Valve's previous console outing, The Orange Box (Portal, Team Fortress 2, Episode 2). The zombie apocalypse is coming, and it's going to be multi-platform.

It works like this: you play as one of four survivors who must co-operate to escape the zombie hordes. There are four hour-long campaigns, each with four sub-sections. Getting through them is a grueling, thrilling cycle of zombie horror and astonishing slaughter. Even if one person drops from a survivor team there are still four characters: Valve's remarkable AI takes over within moments, allowing that person to return a few minutes later, or not at all. (As my buddy discovered to his peril when we argued that we'd rather keep the bot after his restroom break.) This seamless AI handling means that the game can be played solo, or with just a couple of people: the vital four-man fireteam of the survivors remains intact - a vital necessity, as you can't survive without buddies to drag zombies off you, or to save you from tumbling off a roof.

The computer intelligence goes even further than this, however. Left 4 Dead is never the same on any single play-through, and that's not just down to human free will, there's also an unseen hand at work: The Director. This smart piece of programmer effectively controls the ebb and flow of the teeming zombie masses. And we mean teeming. The Zombies are fast - 28 Days Later fast - and they come pouring out of tower-block windows or churning over fences. The Director's job is to make things dramatic each time you see this, and it does that by varying the pacing, and delivering huge surges of zombie attackers when the moment is right. Think you're just about holding off that screaming mass of bodies coming towards you down that alleyway? Then look behind you...

The aptitude with which this artificial system delivers moments of surprise and terror is quite startling, even spooky. Portal writer Erik Wolpaw claimed that "We've started attributing real-life events to The Director..." And you can see why. Just when you're about to make it to the safe-room, or to get yourself out of a tight spot, things only get worse. The Director knows exactly what's happening on the level at all times, and it's going to make things harder for you. Particularly when The Witch is involved. This is one of the boss infected - super-zombies that are vastly more powerful that the sprinting, rotting hordes you face moment-to-moment. The Witch doesn't like to be disturbed, and if you can avoid her it's best to leave her alone. Startle her with bright lights, gunfire, or close proximity and, well, things get bad.

The boss infected each play their own crucial roll - vomiting on you to attract and enrage nearby zombies, strangling you with prehensile tongues, or simply pinning you down to rend your flesh. It's in the Versus mode that these abilities will really have an impact - as players step behind the scenes of the zombie flick to become the infected. Versus mode sees two teams of four-aside swap places across the four sections of each campaign, and the competition becomes fierce as each one tries to outdo the other in griefing the survivors as they run for their lives. Play well and the survivors won't even make it out alive, fail to make the most of your unnatural abilities and a co-ordinated survivor team will come through with nary a scratch. Needless to say, Valve flattened us quite firmly in our Versus session. A harsh-but-firm lesson in how much skill it actually takes to play the bad guys.

It's hard to see Left 4 Dead failing to be anything other than a critical and commercial smash hit. The concept was fully playable almost two years ago, the full focus of the Valve team in the intervening months has smoothed and sculpted this into another multiplayer masterpiece. Between the B-movie in-jokes, the rounded, chatty characters, and the sublimely-timed moments of sheer panic, it's hard to imagine another zombie game ever having quite the same impact again. The question that hangs over Left 4 Dead isn't so much about how much players are going to love it, but more about /how long/ they'll love it for. Will those four campaigns really be enough to satiate our hunger for novelty? Will the asymmetric Versus mode stand up to long-haul competition?

Perhaps the true, crucial question going forward is whether Valve are intend on supporting this game as they have Team Fortress 2, with free follow-up updates in the coming months? "Definitely," says Faliszek, and they'll be knocking out detailed tutorials for people to build and implement their own campaign maps too. "Turning your college or office into a level should be relatively easy," says Faliszek, as if that's the most natural urge in the world. And, with a few hours of battling the infected under your belt, maybe it is.

Left 4 Dead is available on Xbox 360 and PC from November 18th. The demo is out now on Live and PC.

[Jim Rossignol is an editor at RockPaperShotgun.com and the author of This Gaming Life, an account of the life of modern videogames and some of the people who play them. Ragdoll Metaphysics is his Offworld column exploring and analyzing gaming's vast world of esoterica.]

Brandon Boyer

Dragon Quest Monsters Gallery toys get reflective

As the venerable Dragon Quest RPG series continues its ongoing revival via Nintendo DS remakes (most recently with the release of Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen), Square Enix has announced new HD figures in its ''Dragon Quest: Monsters Gallery" toy series. Running on the order of $50-70 for a 9 piece blind-box case due for release at the end of the year, consider the gauntlet thrown in resisting the charm of the above King Slime reflecting pond.

[photo via Hobbystock, which is just about completely covered in other wildly probably-not-work-safe toy photos]

Brandon Boyer

Tomato releases Earthbound Zero 'easy patch'

In a wrap-up post of all the various goings-on that have been going on following the release of the fan translation to Nintendo cult-hit GameBoy Advance RPG Mother 3 (known in the West as Earthbound), pseudonymous project lead 'Tomato' has noted the release of his new patch for the notoriously difficult NES original, Earthbound Zero, which makes the game a bit more friendly to newcomers and the more casually curious by doubling experience and money from each fight.

For the uninitiated: Earthbound Zero is considered by retro collectors one of the original Nintendo's holy grails -- an officially translated but never released debut title in the series that would go on to achieve what can only be described as essentially-rabid cult success when it made its Western debut with Mother 2 as Earthbound on the SNES.

After whetting players' appetites with Earthbound, Nintendo has repeatedly and some-might-say-sadistically teased the West by steadfastly withholding further releases, including both the GBA Mother 3 sequel, a remade Mother 1+2 GBA package, and, as it was later discovered, that original NES release which never saw the light of day (more on that can be found at Lost Level's lengthy breakdown of its eventual discovery and release).

Until the day Nintendo pulls back the lid on a "ah, sorry, we were just teasing" Virtual Console/DS blowout, Tomato's new patch is probably the best way to get a feel for just why the cutely subversive series has garnered that cult status.

Brandon Boyer

Capcom stirring up Monster Hunter pork ramen

If you're still kicking yourself over missing the chance to pick up a Mega Man E-Tank sports drink, be forewarned that late November will bring more Capcom culinary delight with the release of Umai's Monster Hunter Tonkotsu Ramen. Be brave enough to purchase a case of the stuff and import house NCS will also throw in a canvas shopping bag, though nowhere is it assured the stuff wasn't concocted by rambunctious chef-hatted Felynes.

[Monster Hunter Tonkotsu Ramen - Import Preorder]

Brandon Boyer

Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1899.

You might've had an easy guess given the current political happenings who would win Rock Band's presidential contest, but you'd be dead wrong, and, thanks to "Shane," gloriously so.

Presidential Winner [Rock Band]

Brandon Boyer

Blink and you'll miss it

By the time you've read this description, you will have already rescued the princess.

['fast mario' via Waxy]

Brandon Boyer

Duoform opens games fashion label Supercombo

Added to the list of outfits churning out games related clothing you wouldn't instinctively want to cover with a sweater vest when venturing out into public (which currently includes America's Meat Bun, the UK's Way of the Rodent Shop, and Japan's King of Games) comes UK label Supercombo.

Supercombo is run by the Duoform Network's Pete Harrison, who also oversees the more directly art/design related Funkrush fashion label (including some fantastic stuff from vinyl toy/designers Tado, Jon Burgerman, Squink and DGPH), and currently includes such wares as this Trifarce tee, and this One Night Only tee, which -- it must be said -- bears more than a small resemblance to Meat Bun's own Fight Night design.

[Supercombo]

Brandon Boyer

Crayon Physics Deluxe opens pre-orders

If you've kept even half an ear open to the indie games community over the past year, Kloonigames' Crayon Physics should already be a somewhat familiar name. Developer Petri Purho's elegantly concepted and deceptively complex game was the winner not only of the Grand Prize Award at the 2008 Independent Games Festival, but also the recent recipient of the Offworld Award for Most Screamingly Obvious Game Still Not Announced For The DS (a void publisher Majesco has smartly moved to fill with similar forthcoming title Marker Man Adventures, which, I will hazard to guess, is an enhanced handheld port of HatsForMyPencil's Marker World).

Despite unfulfilled platform preferences, it shouldn't pass your attention that Purho's full version of the PC game, Crayon Physics Deluxe, has just gone up for pre-order at his newly unveiled website, promising a full 70 levels in the eventual release, as well as a full level editor, 'and more.' There's currently no firm release date, but those that pre-order the game will be given access to the beta version when it becomes available.

If all of this is news to you, have a look at his original proof of concept demo still available at his site, where Purho has been challenging himself to post a new game developed in under a week every month for nearly two years.

Brandon Boyer

Three Dog's Wasteland Top 40

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but law blog Legal Geekery appears to have got to it first: hidden in amongst (honestly pretty fascinating) posts on public urination and how sexual harassment law might actually shake out in TV's The Office is this full Galaxy News Radio playlist and lyrics from Fallout 3, one of this year's top obsessions.

Once you've spent tens of hours creeping through metro tunnels and history museum wings exploding Super Mutant skulls with a single dead-eye shot of your Lincoln's Repeater as these songs echo gaily off the brick, and even if you've sworn to yourself that you're taking a bit of a break because god dammit there's work to be done, it's hard to even read these words without getting nic-fit type twitches to jump straight back into the Wasteland.

Brandon Boyer

Expose the Wii's hidden Mii-transfer menu.

Unbeknownst to most, Nintendo has snuck undocumented functionality into the Wii's Mii Channel which is filed under curiousity for now, but will likely come in more handy further into 2009 as the company begins to tie its Wii and DSi together more tightly in the West.

First intended for pedometer-enhanced Personal Trainer: Walking (which, along with Math and Cooking, is confirmed for eventual U.S. release), pressing A, then B, then 1, and then holding 2 on your Wii Remote while in the Mii Channel will bring up a new menu item to connect to a DS and transfer Miis to more portable form, and, as seen in the video, kit them out (as we've all been waiting to do) in smart jumpers and workout clothes.

[[Personal Trainer Walking] First Look & DS-Wii Connection, via Tiny Cartridge]

Brandon Boyer

Portal team tells tale of GlaDOS's birth

Though by now the cake is a cliche, and we know every bar of Still Alive frontwards and back from repeat Rock Band playthroughs, the release of the standalone version of Portal on Xbox Live Arcade has given us delightful deja vu of just what was so exceptional about the game to begin with.

Helpfully, industry news site Gamasutra has reprinted its 2007 original postmortem from the development team themselves, giving us a behind the scenes look at how GlaDOS, one of the sharpest-written villains in the history of games, got her voice, courtesy some playful synthesized hacking from Valve writer Erik Wolpaw:

A week after the meeting, Erik came back with some sample dialog he'd recorded using a text-to-speech program. It was a series of announcements that played over the newly-christened "relaxation vault" that appears in Portal's first room.

Everyone on the team liked the funny, sinister tone of the writing, and so Erik continued to write and record announcements for other chambers, while still searching for the story proper.

At some point, however, it became apparent that these announcements were providing playtesters with the incentive to keep playing that we'd been looking for all along.

Better yet, in the sterile, empty test chamber environment, players were actually becoming attached to the alternately soothing and menacing computer guide. We'd found the narrative voice of Portal.

[...]

Our hope was that by the end of the Portal, players would know GLaDOS better than any boss monster in the history of gaming. Though we knew at some point the player would have to meet and destroy her, we thought it would be even more satisfying if players got a chance to cause her some emotional pain along the way.

Thinking With Portals: Creating Valve's New IP [Gamasutra]

Brandon Boyer

Llamasoft taming PC port of Space Giraffe

Easily the most -- let's say misunderstood -- game currently available on Xbox Live, Space Giraffe has also proved one of the most divisive, garnering both a dogpile of negative reviews on its release and later high praise and a cheeky comparison to James Joyce's Ulysses by no less than Braid creator Jon Blow. (It also is the first and happy recipient of the Offworld Award for Video Games' Best Use of Number Stations, for its fantastic opening menu.)

Though creator Jeff Minter -- the very definition of cult figure across Europe for his decades of psychadelia and ungulato-philia inspired games -- publicly cried foul as sales figures stagnated, Llamasoft developer Giles has announced that work is nearly wrapped on the PC version of the game, adding that it's now been slightly retooled for those who found the original's rainbow drips just a bit overwhelming. Says Giles of the contents of the new version:

Space Giraffe exactly as you seen it on the 360 PLUS an "expansion pack" with 100 NEW levels that "no one else has seen before", some of them could be a bit more "vanilla" for those that found the SG original graphics maybe a bit "too blasting for their own taste" we wish this time to really manage to pleasure more and less psychedelic users :)

Meanwhile, for those of us who do like our games as eye-searingly hallucinogenic as possible, the 'softies have also quietly announced that an updated version of their Xbox 360 music visualizer Nuon will be used for the forthcoming Xbox Live Arcade port of Taito's fantastically re-imagined Space Invaders Extreme, which we have high hopes of being a true marriage in psychotropic heaven.

Brandon Boyer

Sony Japan throws PSP players an Ad-hoc Party

With Thursday's update to the PlayStation Network Stores, Sony has landed a major milestone in integrating its PSP and PS3 hardware -- though currently in Japan only. Alongside its local Metal Gear Solid 4 demo and "Rare Week 1" LittleBigPlanet in-game T-shirt, the "Adhoc Party for PSP ϐVerison" is a free download which wirelessly links PSPs to a host PS3 and brings the majority of the PSP's local-only multiplayer games properly online for the first time.

NeoGAF forum users have been scouring Japan's message boards for compatibility lists, and are reporting that games like Phantasy Star Portable, Street Fighter Zero 3, Tekken Dark Resurrection and Final Fantasy Tactics have all made the online leap.

More importantly, Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G -- consistently both Capcom and the PSP's top selling title in Japan -- has made the jump, coming just as Capcom makes its some-might-call-it-a-defection to the Wii for the third console volume of the Monster Hunter series. With online chat (a necessity for Hunter's party-based tactical action) added to all games via the PS3s Bluetooth headsets, the update issure to breathe new life into that and a number of other since-neglected PSP games.

The catch? Apart from needing a Japanese PSN account to download the software (easily done with a little clever hacking about), Ad-Hoc Party requires both built-in wifi and a wired PS3 connection, so owners of the original 20 gig PS3 model, and anyone currently outside an ethernet cable's reach of the nearest router are out of luck. Otherwise, U.S. and EU versions of PSP games have already been confirmed as working, so consult the demonstration video above and let us know how it's working for you in the comments below.

Brandon Boyer

Media Molecule set up the LittleBigWorkshop.

Apparently not content to have created one of the most charmingly transparent and inspiringly participatory games in recent memory, Sony and Media Molecule have revealed the LittleBigWorkshop, bringing social networking to the LBP community.

The Workshop includes the 'workshop' itself, which, it turns out, is a showcase for uploaded YouTube videos of player creations (or more commonly at the moment, inexplicably unrelated Legend of Zelda and Metal Gear Solid 4 videos), a photo collection 'inspiration room' (including duly inspiring photos of dolphins blowing bubble rings), and a Flash-based blueprint creator to flesh out ideas for future levels.

This on top of the requisite forums and profile pages with player Facebook and MySpace links, but, presumably, the workshop is just the first phase, with tighter PS3/web integration due as the LittleBigPlatform evolves -- the site promises more tools and profile features are on their way.

Brandon Boyer

Tim Schafer releases original Grim Fandango design docs.

Though 'classic LucasArts adventures' is generally more synonymous with games like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Sam'n'Max, Double Fine (Psychonauts) founder Tim Schafer's final -- and, arguably, finest -- game for the venerable publisher was Grim Fandango, his gritty muertos-noir gumshoe adventure that's just past its 10 year anniversary this Halloween.

To celebrate, he's uploaded all 72 pages of original documentation on the game as a pint sized PDF (direct link seems to be missing, but re-hosted locally). As he explains/apologizes upon reflection:

People said the puzzles in Grim were super hard, and I've always maintained that this was due to a deep character flaw or mental illness on the part of the player. But now, reading this again, I've realized that holy smokes--Some of them puzzles were nuts. Obscure. Mean, even.

[...]

Look how much stuff we had to cut just to get that game done in three years. The Pizza Demon! Giraffe Lady! Bernard, and my beloved Dillopede. And the five-puzzle action climax with Hector LeMans! If only we had one or two more years! Well, reading about them ten years later is just as good, right?

But, spoiler alert, the entire document is, by definition, one big spoiler. However, explains Schafer of the solution to the final act of the game:

We didn't have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline. As if anybody was going to read it all the way to the end anyway. Ha ha. Obfuscation triumphs again! I delight in Evil!

Just One More Grim Thing (Double Fine Action News)